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#21
actualy no, that majorly depends on amount of memory your graphic card is having :) this "myth" started when more people started to get 4gb of ram in days when graphic cards had 384-512MB of ram.
32bit system can address maximium 4gb of memory, before you can figure out how much memory you have maximum usable, you need to take in to account all graphic card memory, soundcard memory(xram for example) and everything else that system needs to have access to. So in 32bit system:
phsyical memory usable = 4GB - graphic card memory - all the other things
since he have gtx280 that means graphic card already is having 1GB of memory system needs to address, so 4gb - 1gb = 3gb, other 0.25GB is probably used on random stuff he also have in his computer and as far as i know windows is rounding this in computer screen down in steps of 0.25GB.
but ye only real solution for you is go to 64bit system.